SOURCE: Altick, Richard D. “Public Libraries.” In The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900, pp. 213-39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.

In the following excerpt, Altick examines early public libraries in England, many of which were devoted to theological works and antiquities of little interest to the general reader.

I.

As early as the fifteenth century, posthumous benevolence in England sometimes took the form of library endowment. Here and there, instead of leaving part of one's fortune to found and maintain a grammar school, or to relieve future generations of the worthy poor, a decedent provided for the establishment of a library which he usually directed was to be freely open to the public. In Bristol one such library (endowed by various members of the Kalendars guild) was begun in 1464, and a second in 1613. In Manchester the merchant and cloth-manufacturer Humphrey Chetham...